Courts and Criminals | Page 9

by marriage and carries an open account on his books with the defendant's father.
"I think we will excuse Mr. Ananias," politely remarks the prosecutor; then in an undertone he turns to his chief and mutters: "The old rascal! He would have knifed us if we'd given him the chance!" And all this time the disgruntled Mr. Ananias is wondering why, if he didn't "know the defendant or his family," he was not accepted as a juror.
Of course, every district attorney has, or should have, information as to each talesman's actual capabilities as a juror and something of a record as to how he has acted under fire. If he is a member of the "special" panel, it is easy to find out whether he has ever acquitted or convicted in any cause celebre, and if he has acquitted any plainly guilty defendant in the past it is not likely that his services will be required. If, however, he has convicted in such a case the district attorney may try to lure the other side into accepting him by making it appear that he himself is doubtful as to the juror's desirability. Sometimes persons accused of crime themselves, and actually under indictment, find their way onto the panels, and more than one ex-convict has appeared there in some inexplicable fashion. But to find them out may well require a double shift of men working day and night for a month before the case is called, and what may appear to be the most trivial fact thus discovered may in the end prove the decisive argument for or against accepting the juror.
Panel after panel may be exhausted before a jury in a great murder trial has been selected, for each side in addition to its challenges for "cause" or "bias" has thirty* peremptory ones which it may exercise arbitrarily. If the writer's recollection is not at fault, the large original panel drawn in the first Molineux trial was used up and several others had to be drawn until eight hundred talesmen had been interrogated before the jury was finally selected. It is usual to examine at least fifty in the ordinary murder case before a jury is secured.
* In the State of New York.
It may seem to the reader that this scrutiny of talesmen is not strictly preparation for the trial, but, in fact, it is fully as important as getting ready the facts themselves; for a poor jury, either from ignorance or prejudice, will acquit on the same facts which will lead a sound jury to convict. A famous prosecutor used to say, "Get your jury--the case will take care of itself."
But as the examination of the panel and the opening address come last in point of chronology it will be well to begin at the beginning and see what the labors of the prosecutor are in the initial stages of preparation. Let us take, for example, some notorious case, where an unfortunate victim has died from the effects of a poisoned pill or draught of medicine, or has been found dead in his room with a revolver bullet in his heart. Some time before the matter has come into the hands of the prosecutor, the press and the police have generally been doing more or less (usually less) effective work upon the case. The yellow journals have evolved some theory of who is the culprit and have loosed their respective reporters and "special criminologists" upon him. Each has its own idea and its own methods--often unscrupulous. And each has its own particular victim upon whom it intends to fasten the blame. Heaven save his reputation! Many an innocent man has been ruined for life through the efforts of a newspaper "to make a case," and, of course, the same thing, though happily in a lesser degree, is true of the police and of some prosecutors as well.
In every great criminal case there are always four different and frequently antagonistic elements engaged in the work of detection and prosecution--first, the police; second, the district attorney; third, the press; and, lastly, the personal friends and family of the deceased or injured party. Each for its own ends--be it professional pride, personal glorification, hard cash, or revenge--is equally anxious to find the evidence and establish a case. Of course, the police are the first ones notified of the commission of a crime, but as it is now almost universally their duty to inform at once the coroner and also the district attorney thereof, a tripartite race for glory frequently results which adds nothing to the dignity of the administration of criminal justice.
The coroner is at best no more than an appendix to the legal anatomy, and frequently he is a disease. The spectacle of a medical man of small learning and less English